


I wanna be your left-hand man

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Flirting, Meet-Cute, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-31 07:48:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8570362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: Daisy only invades his room because she's really tired of listening to Raina have sex from the common room and she needs someplace with more outlets.  Not because she thinks her RA is hot.  Not because she wants to see what he looks like when he smiles.  And definitely not because she likes him.Robbie Reyes only lets her stay because he doesn't want to do roommate mediation for her.  Not because he thinks she's gorgeous.  Not because he likes hearing her laugh. And definitely not because he likes her.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Riptide by Vance Joy.

It's 10pm on a Wednesday night and someone is knocking on his door. Robbie glances up from his textbook and glares over at the door. The knocking continues anyway. Whoever it is should know better. He has his official RA office hours (mandated by the Dean of Residential Life, who has clearly never been forced to analyze text messages by two overanxious freshman girls for a good hour and a half) and they happen on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6 to 8 pm and on Saturdays from 12 to 2. The knocking has now taken on the distinctive tune of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”. Robbie gets up with a sigh and goes to answer the door. Someone had better be on fire. At the very least.

No one is on fire. Or bleeding. Or puking up their guts. Instead Daisy Johnson is standing in his doorway, wearing Deadpool print leggings and an oversize flannel shirt, clutching her laptop in one hand and a giant bag of cheddar popcorn in the other. He almost would have preferred the fire. Because she's smiling at him and she smells faintly like cinnamon and when she leans forward to peer into his room, he catches a flash of black lace at her neckline and—the point is, she's his resident. And he definitely doesn't think she's pretty.

“I'm not fixing the microwave again,” he says and prepares to shut the door.

“Wait, wait, wait!” She slides around the door before it can shut. “It's not that.”

“I'm not talking to that Loki kid about his music either. If he wants to play electronic versions of show tunes, he can--”

“Look, Raina is having sex. In our room. Right now. And I kind of need somewhere to stay. She's really loud,” Daisy says with a grimace. “She's also hooking up with the guy I dated last year. So that's a fun time.”

“So you picked my room?”

“Yup. You're my resident adviser, right? Advise me.” She flops down in his chair, tucking her legs underneath her, and extends the bag of popcorn out towards her. “I brought popcorn and everything. I would have brought Oreos too but they're still in the room and well...”

“So you want to do roommate mediation?” Roommate mediation involves a lot of paperwork and meetings with the Resident Director and contracts and follow-up meetings and Robbie is willing to go through all of that if it means he can get Daisy Johnson, and her long legs sprawled across his floor, out of his room.

“Nope, we're good. I brought a guy back last weekend anyway,” she adds off-handedly. “And I've been told that I'm pretty loud.”

Robbie isn't imagining what “pretty loud” might sound like. Not at all. He nearly chokes on his popcorn anyway.

 

That Saturday, she shows up at his door again. She has a jar of Nutella this time and what looks like a thirty ounce container of Goldfish. All his other residents are probably out in a frat basement somewhere, drinking cheap alcohol and making the kind of bad decisions he no longer has time for, and she's wearing three different kinds of flannel and what looks like a blanket draped around her shoulders. It is indeed a blanket, he finds out when she marches right into his room and spreads it across the floor. It's blue and fuzzy and no one can ever find out that anything like it ever was in his room. Because the thing is, he's widely considered to be one of the cooler RA's. He has a leather jacket and a fast car and sometimes he gets pizza for hall snacks. And this is...well, there are so many things wrong with this situation. The Nutella, the program she's running on her laptop that might be illegal, the unspeakable things the stupid part of his brain wants to do to her on that fuzzy blue blanket...Robbie tells the stupid part of his brain to shut the hell up. It just gets more imaginative.

“I just want to watch Netflix in peace,” she tells him and gives him eyeliner-streaked puppy dog eyes.

“I'm not a hotel,” he grumbles. “Can't you go hang out with your friend? The small British one.”

“She has a date with her boything. Friend with benefits? Whatever she's calling it this week. Besides, Jemma always wants to watch Doctor Who. I mean, I like Doctor Who. Just not all the time. Too much--” Daisy makes a gesture that involves wheeling both arms around in the air, jazz hands, and a confused expression.

“Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey?”

“Of course you watch it,” she sighs. “Want to explain all the time stuff to me? Because I still don't get the Weeping Angels exactly—like, does Moffat have to use them every single time he wants a terrifying villain?”

They end up watching three episodes and getting into a lengthy argument about the personality of the TARDIS. 

 

“Is your roommate stealing all the condoms from the free condom bowl?” he asks when she shows up a week later. No matter how many condom request forms he puts in to Health Services, the bowl is literally always empty and the resident director won't let him put a surveillance camera in to figure out who thinks taking them is a funny joke. (None of his residents are having that much sex. He would have gotten complaints about the noise.)

“Nope, not classy enough for her. The Great Condom Thief of East Hall strike again?” Daisy flops down into what she's decided is her favorite spot on the floor and produces a bag of Reese's Pieces from the pockets of her hoodie. She's appeared in his room three times since last Saturday, claiming sexile each and every time, and Robbie's finally stopped making grumbling noises when she does. Clearly, he's stuck with her. (He doesn't mind too much.)

“That's really what we're calling it?”

“Hey, I like it. Candy?” She sticks the bag of Reese's Pieces out towards him and pops another handful in her mouth.

“Are you trying to bribe me to overlook the illegal router you have in your room?” Robbie ignores the fact that he knew about the router three weeks into the school year. He was going to give her a week to get rid of it before he told the dean. (He really was.) He...just never got around to it.

“Nope. If I was going to bribe you, I'd have something much better than candy.” She grins at him and Robbie tells himself again that he doesn't think she's gorgeous. (Just pretty.) “So do you want to watch The West Wing with me tonight?”

“You know, I have a reputation to protect. All my other residents think that I only watch dark murder mysteries and The Walking Dead.”

“Hey, you cried during “Two Cathedrals.”

Somewhere around the middle of their second episode, she yawns and tips her head onto his shoulder, the warmth of her pressed against his side and the choppy strands of her hair spilling across his chest. Somewhere around the middle of the fifth episode, when she's nearly asleep on his shoulder, he sifts a hand through her hair and lets it slip through his fingers. 

She practically purrs, curling into his side, and Robbie knows one thing for sure: he is so fucked.

 

“Do you like James Bond?” she asks and peers around the edge of Robbie's door. She promised herself that she wasn't going to stop by his room today but she's wearing new jeans and a low-cut dark red top that Bobbi made her buy the last time they went shopping together. Not that he needs to see them, because having a thing for her RA would just be stupid. And, according to rule number seventeen of the Residential handbook, not allowed. (Jemma has the handbook memorized.)

“I like the cars,” he says absently, frowning down at his textbook. “The Aston Martin.”

“A bunch of my friends and I are going to see the new one. If you wanted to come along with us, you know—you could.” Daisy shrugs and tries to make it sound casual. “They don't bite. Just ask a bunch of nosy questions. But I promise I'll karate-chop them into submission if they try to grill you. May taught me how.”

(Melinda May is her favorite political science professor. She also happens to teach self-defense classes every Friday. Daisy aspires to be half as much of a badass as she is some day.)

“Sure you're not going to knock yourself out with your bunk bed this time?” Robbie smirks at her and she silently curses herself for ever telling him about the time she was practicing in her room and got a little too enthusiastic. Then his eyes slide down to her outfit and he quickly looks away again, fingers curling tightly around a pencil. “But I have a problem set due Thursday. For thermodynamics.”

“Well, there's lots of thermodynamics in James Bond,” she blurts out. “Cars, explosions, all those gadgets Q designs. My friend Fitz keeps on trying to replicate them—he managed to get rid of three roommates in three weeks with his experiments.”

“Wait, is your friend Leo Fitz? He has an entire file in the office,” Robbie says. “Pretty sure Ms. Hand hates him.”

“Don't you want to meet a living legend?” Daisy offers and leans further into his room. His eyes flick over to her top again, lingering a little longer this time. She so owes Bobbi a favor.

He finally agrees. But only after she promises that nothing's going to happen to the Aston Martin this time.

 

She spends most of finals week studying in his room, books and notes surrounding her in a circle so she literally can't escape them and laptop propped open in front of her with every distraction site blocked. “Isn't your roommate studying too?” Robbie asks her after she throws one of her highlighters across the room in frustration. She never should have let Jemma talk her into trying her patented highlighter system—it involves fifteen different colors and thirty different symbols, none of which she has the patience for.

“She's studying the human anatomy, if that's what you mean,” Daisy grumbles. Admittedly, Raina seems to have slowed down her pace over the past few weeks, probably because Lincoln is trying to pass organic chemistry and has significantly less time to spend in Raina's Sex Vortex tm. Last Sunday morning, she was even able to come back to her room before 1pm. She just gets more work done in Robbie's room. (Netflix and occasional pointless mental tangents about what he might look like under those ever-present gray t-shirts aside.)

“But if I'm, um, if I'm bothering you, I can always go to the library,” she adds quickly. “Sit in a sad little cubicle somewhere, being glared at whenever I eat Cheez-Its, slowly wasting away without anyone to watch The West Wing with...”

She tries to look as tragic and pathetic as possible.

“Nah, it's fine. I—I've gotten kind of used to having you around. Besides, I should probably be here when you and Lewis finally snap and take down Loki,” Robbie says, smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I need to see these famous flexible karate skills in action. You keep on telling me that you're good but all I've seen is you waking everyone up by doing tai chi in the common room.”

“Oh, I'm good. Really, _really_ good,” she tells him, dragging out the last word just to see how he'll react.

His eyes catch on hers and stay there and suddenly she's struggling to breathe. She wants him to do something. Anything. (And yes, she has a list going in her head of everything she's imagined doing with him on his desk, bed, chair, and rug but she's not picky.)

Robbie's gaze slips down to her mouth. Her heart is racing and her throat is dry and she can feel her blood pounding in her ears and absolutely nothing happens.

Daisy thinks that she might die of sexual frustration. 

 

She thought that Robbie Reyes didn't go to parties. But there he is, leaning up against the back wall in his leather jacket, sipping slowly from a red Solo cup and looking better than he has any right to.

“You're not supposed to have a hot RA,” she complains to Bobbi. “They're supposed to have hall snacks and clipboards and shit and give you lectures about quiet hours.”

“Just sleep with him once and get it out of your system. That's what I told Jemma about Fitz,” Bobbi says.

“Right, because that worked so well? Because Fitz and Jemma have been sleeping together for nearly seven months and are currently engaged in round number five of heavy denial.” Daisy is expecting another tearful phone call from Jemma sometime in the next few days.

“You know, I think that round number five is really going to be the last one. Anyway, you think he's hot. He thinks you're hot. There's nothing complicated about this situation,” Bobbi says and gives her a little shove in Robbie's direction. 

Sober Daisy never takes dating advice from Bobbi. But three-shots-in Daisy always does. She and Bobbi did shots of some vodka that tasted like cotton candy and she's been sipping on some kind of syrupy sweet punch and the whole world feels warm and he's looking at her and she—she wants. And that's all she can think about.

“You ignored the theme,” she says. “Why am I not surprised?”

“I don't own any Hawaiian print shirts. Didn't feel like buying one.”

“Really? Because I think you'd look great in florals. You can always borrow mine if you want.” She sidles closer to him, glancing up from underneath her lashes, and hears him suck in a sharp breath. 

“What would you do then?” he manages. They're so close that she can see the different shades of brown in his eyes, his pupils blown wide as he looks at her.

“I'm creative. I'm sure we could work something out,” she breathes. She nearly reaches out to skim a hand over his leather jacket—she's seen it before, hanging over the back of his chair or tossed across his bed, but it looks so much better on him. 

“You're trouble, you know that?”

“You like it.”

He groans—actually groans—and then he's pulling her closer, one hand spanning her waist and the other skimming up her side to cup her face, and his hips are pressed tight against hers and he's kissing her like she's a problem he's going to crack, testing and teasing with tongue and lips and teeth until she sighs and melts against him and she crowds him up against the wall because she needs to get as close as she possibly can and—and he stops.

“I can't,” he tells her. “I want to—dios mio, you have no idea how much I want to—but I can't. Not right now.”

And then before she can say anything else, he's gone.

 

The morning after the party, Robbie looks at the facts as he knows them.  
1\. Dating one of his residents is strictly forbidden.  
2\. He's shit at relationships anyway.  
3\. She was drunk last night.  
4\. He probably shouldn't.  
5\. He wants her anyway.

The morning after the party, Daisy recaps last night to Jemma and Bobbi over brunch.  
1\. She just had what was probably the best kiss of her life.  
2\. It probably can't happen again for the rest of the year.  
3\. She will actually implode if it doesn't.  
4\. He could get in trouble if it does.  
5\. She wants him anyway.

“Move in with us,” Bobbi says simply. “Elena's going back to Colombia next semester, so we'll have an open room.”

“We'll scare off anyone else that Res Life tries to put in there,” Jemma promises. “And you know what else we'll do? Bake lots of Christmas cookies. Carbs fix everything. And you can give the ones with extra sprinkles to him.”

She doesn't know if Christmas cookies are really going to do anything, but Jemma Simmons with a mixer and a jar of sprinkles is a terrifying sight and before she know it, she has a beautifully packaged tin of chocolate crinkles, gingerbread men, and caramel-stuffed snickerdoodles for Robbie.

 

She's going to be discreet. She's going to leave the tin and walk away. She really is. But he pulls the door open when she's in the middle of arranging the note on top of the tin.

“Daisy?” he asks, blinking. “Are you—did you—do I have to give your roommate another noise warning?”

“No, I'm staying with Jemma tonight. I'm actually, um, moving into her suite next semester. We made cookies and I—I thought that you might want some.” She practically shoves the tin at him. “And I also...well, I thought that since you're not going to be my RA next semester, we could celebrate. No more me knocking on your door in the middle of the night, no more getting Cheeto dust on your carpet, no more--”

“I didn't mind. Any of it. I like having you around,” he admits slowly.

“Even though I'm trouble?”

“I've always had a thing for trouble.” Robbie takes a deep breath and reaches out to wind his fingers through hers.

“Good then,” she tells him, leaning in to brush her lips across his cheek and dangerously close to his mouth. “I think you might be trouble too.”

 

Three weeks later, he is officially no longer her RA. She spends the night in his room anyway.


End file.
